WWDC - day one

The WWDC keynote is always an odd event to attend. It's put on for the benefit of the investors and the media, with the developers being invited purely to act as braying masses expressing their adulation for His Steveness. It's rare for any technical content to make it into the session, except in unavoidable cases such as the 2005 keynote. The focus of that was the Intel transition, so by necessity there had to be some technical justification of the switch.

With this in mind, it's not hard to see that the keynote can be a somewhat dull affair. Obviously as both an Apple customer and member of the "economic ecosystem" of the Mac, it's always good to be as informed as possible of the company's position and direction. That said, yesterday's keynote (no wi-fi in this hotel, so a late post) contained less of interest to me than usual.

As I mentioned I'm financially dependent on Apple (in an indirect sense of course; I'm paid to write Mac software for Sophos, therefore no Mac = no job at Sophos), though as I'm not an indie dev I have a bit more of a comfort buffer than many people. The enterprise iPhone video Steve showed was basically a backslap in front of the shareholders; look, there are people who really do use this stuff! Then the laundry list of every developer who's downloaded the SDK and managed to get something to compile; interesting to see the wealth of different domains into which the iPhone is entering, but seriously. Two demos, three tops. Not all four thousand of the known apps. Good to see TEH CHEAP being applied to the 3G iPhone, though; I may have to
have a discussion with Orange about a PAC when that's available.

Which left Mobile Me. This is actually a pretty cool reboot of iTools^W.Mac, OK it looks like there might be no more iCards but on the other hand the Mobile Me syncing is really beneficial. I can see that becoming more of a cash cow for Apple, though mainly because they opened it up to the PC; people who have an iPod and Windoze could buy MM to synchronise their contacts, mail and so on, as well as getting webmail access (and webmail access which doesn't suck balls as much as
Exchange's OWA, may I add). That then might make them more amenable to the Halo Effect and the purchase of a Mac down the line.

The rest of the day was interesting but obviously undisclosable, except for the evening I spent in a couple of bars down the financial district (the Golden%Braeburn event at 111 Minna, where I went with Steffi from BNR and a couple of Cocotron committers; then Dave's bar where I met Nigel and most of Apple UK). Conversation ranged from Sophos feature requests to the drinkability of American IPAs; all good stuff!